Have we reached peak internet solipsism?
What is Facebook up to?
[d]anah [b]oyd is lucky enough to occupy a weird space between academia and the “establishment.” Holding that position allows you to throw Queer Theory into your (excellent) rant about FB’s privacy debacle:
Jeff Jarvis gets at the core issue with his post “Confusing *a* public with *the* public”. As I’ve said time and time again, people do want to engage in public, but not the same public that includes all of you. Jarvis relies on Habermas, but the right want to read this is through the ideas of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”. Facebook was originally a counterpublic, a public that people turned to because they didn’t like the publics that they had accessed to. What’s happening now is ripping the public that was created to shreds and people’s discomfort stems from that.
Borrowing from Adam Phillips’s Houdini’s Box: people once escaped to Facebook, now they’re escaping from Facebook…
(via somethingchanged)
Just sayin’…
Pretty illuminating compendium from the EFF.
from a comment on hacker news
Hacker News | Same goes for Apple and the uprising against their banning of non-native develop…
(via fred-wilson)
Kind of a snobby sentiment (at least the second half), but true for the most part?
Facebook begins its breeding program.
First, the Economist weighs in on “digital natives,” a pet peeve of mine. Fortunately, they’re also of the opinion that the designation just doesn’t make any sense, and that many young people are as technologically illiterate as others across the generations.
Want proof? Read on.
Further down the banal end of the spectrum, the New York Times reports that couples fight on Facebook and it annoys other people. Facebook, meanwhile, is in a fight of its own after the Guardian alleged that the site is a ground for pedo predators.
Meanwhile, here’s some administrative brilliance in the latest 8th grade sexting scandal:
A Massachusetts middle school is caught in a sexting scandal after an 8th-grade boy allegedly sold naked pictures of his girlfriend to fellow students for $5 a pop. […] The school released a statement pointing out the incident took place off school grounds. [Emphasis added.]
Clearly a vital fact. Fortunately, some courts are taking into account that lots of people do this, and most of them are children, not child pornographers. Nebraskan legislators are building some subtlety into their regulations and the punishment that befalls sexters:
There are two basic scenarios. In one, a teenager shares a nude picture, usually with a romantic partner. In the other, a partner, or more commonly an ex-partner, distributes the image.
The new Nebraska law makes that distinction, giving a pass to children under 18 who send out their own photograph to a willing recipient who is at least 15. On the other hand, a teenager who passes the photograph on to friends could face a felony child pornography charge and five years in prison.
Meanwhile, there’s mounting evidence that we’re all a bunch of Internet addicts, so laws will have to keep apace of this changing behavior:
Almost half of those under 25 said they’re cool with being interrupted during a meal and 11 percent said they’re fine with it during sex (those over 25 were less OK with these things, at 27 percent and six percent respectively).
(This is less interesting than the data about time and frequency of accessing social networking services, but it’s funnier! (New meaning to “sexting,” etc.))
On a positive note, a psychologist has deployed Implicit Association Tests to check for suicidal tendencies among people who may not even know they have them. Notes the writeup:
… the unconscious associations were a much better suicide predictor than depression, previous suicide attempts, or the intuition of the attending clinician.
People and technology: often baffling, never boring.
